Three Films Make A Post: The Price Is Blood

Climax (2018): Leave it to very French director Gaspar Noé to make a film about a group of dancers getting dosed with LSD and going on a shared trip of dance, sex, violence and death that can feel excessive and abstract at the same time, breaking taboos without getting smug about it. Stylistically, it goes through the sort of intensities of colour, movement and behaviour a viewer will by now expect of the director – an audience not okay with strobe lights and a lot of shrieking need not apply – yet the film never feels to be the wrong kind of self-indulgent, Noé always getting to a point eventually even if his films seem to be meandering. Style in this director’s case is still an important part of the substance of his movies.

Under the Silver Lake (2018): This, the film writer/director David Robert Mitchell made after the brilliant It Follows, on the other hand is very self-indulgent indeed. It’s yet another one of those LA movies apparently made explicitly so that filmmakers existing in their LA bubble can wink and smile smugly at the other inhabitants of said bubble watching, full of in-jokes only the LA-obsessed will tolerate and apparently vacant of any wish to communicate with the rest of the world. Add to this general air of group masturbation a pie made out of badly digested Pynchon and Lynch, and you have a film I want to punch in the face rather badly, even though I’ve only got a tiny non-punching guy’s fist available, and am not into punching on general principle anyway.

There’s certainly a lot of technically excellent filmmaking on display here, but I’ll wait for that to be applied to something other than a bloated, 140 minute in-joke, thank you very much. Though, given how different this one is from Mitchell’s other two features, and those from one another, I might not have too long to wait; at least, one can’t blame the man for simply repeating himself.

Breaking Away (1979): Rather better at using an actual place – in this case the somewhat unglamorous and therefor infinite more interesting Bloomington, Indiana – to actually speak about something of interest to people not living there is this coming-of-age comedy by Peter Yates (also a man of very different films). It treats the feelings of young working class men of not belonging into the world of their parents but also being blocked from participating in the world the people born rich or richer seem to enjoy so much with delicacy, dignity, and a sense of whimsy, not going the poverty porn route of painting everyone and everything in the bleakest possible way yet also not looking away from shit.


Yates’s treatment of the material is so clear-eyed and even-handed, he even sells a climactic cycling event as meaningful and exciting to a guy like me who could care less about people riding bikes in circles (even though it’s a nice metaphor for the human condition). There’s also brilliant, idiosyncratic use of classical music in a context where most movies would go for Springsteen or would-be Springsteen, and great performances by Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, a tiny Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley.

In short: Robocop (2014)

Well, for the remake of a much-loved classic, José Padilha’s re-do of Verhoeven’s magnum opus isn’t too horrible. At least it gets the most important basic for any remake of this kind right and doesn’t try to be exactly like the original but newer, and so really needn’t be held up to a direct comparison.

For the first hour or so, I even thought the film’s political and social ideas were rather interesting and actually contemporary, but the final third sees things breaking down more or less completely, with nothing of what’s going on making any sense at all: thematically, the film completely loses its way (or rather, seems to have lost any wish to talk about anything interesting anymore), character-wise nothing anyone but Murphy does has any connection to the things they supposedly want, and instead follows the old rule of “Why? It’s in the script!”. Dramatically, it becomes all very confused and generic. It certainly doesn’t help here that the finale is understandably – this being a big budget Hollywood movie - action-heavy, and action really isn’t the film’s strong suit throughout its running time. The action may be fast and very very loud but it also isn’t terribly interesting or exciting to watch, because it’s – like the production design – so shiny and glossy and slick I found myself more involved in thinking about the number of people who must have been working hard putting in all these digital reflections, and how many cleaning people every public and private building in this world must employ, than in feeling much adrenaline flowing. Which isn’t exactly what you want from a SF action film, particularly not once it has stopped thinking because it is too busy shooting.


The solid first hour – also full of really good big acting by Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson – is absolutely worth watching, but I think watching only that and making up one’s own ending is the best way to go with Robocop.

Dollman (1991)

After some (un)funny business concerning “fat ladies”, delightfully named space cop on the edge Brick Bardo (Tim Thomerson) gets into a space chase with his flying head nemesis – who is such a delightful thing because Brick shot off the rest of his body during various earlier encounters we alas do not witness – Sprug (Frank Collison). Spug threatens their home planet in general and Brick specifically with some kind of dimensional bomb that’ll turn out to not amount to much of an explosion much later on.

Both their ships end up crashing down on Earth, the South Bronx to be precise. It’s a movie and it’s 1991, so it’s gang violence central there. Which might be a bit of a problem, because Brick turns out to be only 12 inches tall. Fortunately, he has a very special gun that’ll kill giants dead as good as anyone his own size. Brick starts out early with using it too, for he saves idealistic community activist Debi Alejandro (Kamala Lopez-Dawson) from some gang violence right after he comes to again. Debi grabs Brick and his damaged spaceship, while Sprug and his bomb land in the loving arms of also delightfully named gang boss Braxton Red (Jackie Earle Haley). Things develop from there rather as you’d expect them to.

To my surprise, this is one Albert Pyun movie I actually like. I’m not sure what happened during the making of the film, but somehow it avoids both of the curses plaguing the director’s filmography: Dollman is neither an exercise in boredom mostly broken up by different kinds of boredom, nor does it mistreat a viewer’s eyes with the dregs of Pyun’s would-be artsy direction style that’ll usually make everything he does different to parse bordering on complete inexplicability. Instead, the film’s pace is lively, and the direction expert low budget craft. If this was the first or only Pyun film I’d seen, I’d actually seek out more. It’s rather confusing, I have to admit.

Adding to these virtues is a script by Chris Roghair (an only writing credit that to me suggests a pseudonym) that’s often actually as funny as it thinks it is – though I could have gladly gone without the “fat ladies” bit – when it joyfully wades into cop on the edge clichés and mixes them with plain weird crap. Because the weird stuff alone probably won’t carry a whole film, and because it’s certainly much more interesting this way, Dollman’s tone turns surprisingly serious whenever Debi begins to talk about gang violence. It’s not exactly social realism, but the way the more earnest bits and the full-on B-movie bullshit collide and intermingle is highly fascinating and entertaining. The film also turns Haley’s Braxton into something more than a pure action movie villain. He’s crazy, violent and vile, but he also gets the motives and even a bit of the ambiguity of a person. Which obviously turns his and Debi’s interactions with tiny space aliens just the decisive bit weirder still. Even better, everyone in the cast – Thomerson is Thomerson anyway, and young-ish Haley and Lopez-Dawson certainly are no slouches - can actually sell this tonal strangeness rather well, making the film at once funnier and just plain interesting.

These are not words I expected to write about an Albert Pyun film about a tiny space cop taking place right in producer Albert Band’s main obsession space, but who am I to complain about a film being much more awesome and inspired than I expected?

Three Films Make A Post: Monsters walk the Earth in a ravishing rampage of clawing fury!

Watchmen (Ultimate Cut) (2009): I know, as a good little nerd I'm bound by law to hate Zack Snyder and everything he has ever done with an intensity sane people reserve for guys who eat babies, or are Hitler, but I just don't. In fact, I think Snyder's highly artificial and operatic version of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen ain't half bad. Often, the film nearly manages to reach the heights its aiming for with its choice of source, at other times, it gets bogged down in slight bloat or is trying to stay so close to surface elements of the comic that it's veering into the territory of the unintentionally comical, but the latter does come with a territory as inherently ridiculous as the superhero genre (that I love just as much as Snyder seems to do).

In other words, I think Watchmen is a perfectly fine film.

 

I.K.U. (2000): Taiwanese-American arthouse director Shu Lea Cheang made this hard softcore low budget movie in Japan with a predominantly Japanese cast and crew, and it's pretty much like an outsider's dream of what a Japanese cyber-porn movie would look like. There is some sort of story about a sex-data collecting android called Reiko in there, but Cheang seems more interested in burying it under every cheap visual trick you can afford when you're producing your movie digitally. The whole film works inside of the stylistic parameters of Japanese low-budget cyberpunk films like Tetsuo, just with sex taking the place of the violence, and gender- and sexual fluidity that of less precisely located bodily transformations. Like its predecessors, it'll either give you a headache from exposure to too much visual and audial information in too little time, or make you quite happy in its own psychedelic way.

 

Drive Angry (2011): Well, depending on your preferences, this charming little ditty about Nic Cage crawling from hell to save his baby granddaughter and driving, angry, is either the End of Western Civilization made film or an adorable attempt at making a movie that is exactly like an old grindhouse film without even a hint of the intelligence other lovers of the form like Rodriguez and Tarantino apply to it.

Being who I am, I'm obviously pretty alright with both interpretations. What's not to love about a film featuring Nicolas Cage grimacing and mumbling, Amber Heard perfectly emulating all the sexy good-naturedness of 70s exploitation heroines who deserved better than their filmic surroundings gave them, William Fichtner doing his best Christopher Walken impression, random nudity, horrible jokes, and a bit of the old ultra violence set to generic rock music?

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